The Most Mexican of Us All: Yiddish Modernism and the Racial Politics of National Belonging

abstract:This article investigates how Yiddish writing in Mexico illuminates the ambiguous position of Jews both within their local context and as part of a global network of Yiddish modernist writers. Through an analysis of the poetry of two Jewish immigrants to Mexico, Yitzjok (Isaac) Berliner (1899–1957) and Jacobo Glantz (1902–1982), this article argues that these immigrant poets adopted local themes and styles characteristic of Mexican modernism as a way to rhetorically write Jews into the nation. Although Mexican modernist literature and art was most typically expressed in Spanish, these poets took on local forms but preserved Jewish difference by writing in Yiddish. At the same time, Berliner and Glantz also engaged with a global, diasporic network of Yiddish modernism centered in New York and Warsaw. Focusing on the so-called "Mexican" subject matter enabled these poets to participate in a larger conversation about expanding the boundaries of Yiddish literature, proposing the literature's worldliness by speaking beyond an explicitly Jewish experience. The works of these immigrant writers, therefore, demonstrate the emergence of a Third Space at the intersection not only of the immigrant and the nation, but also between the periphery and the centers of a transnational Yiddish network.